At Inga Alpaca, our alpacas are shorn once a year, depending on the length of the fiber. For best results it has to be no larger than 10 cm (4 in) and we only use the sides and top fleece. This fleece is taken to our processing plant and will eventually become the yarn that we use in our finished products.

The freshly shorn fiber is spread out over a mesh table to remove clippings, dirt, twigs and any other organic matter. The mesh table will allow all these to fall through the mesh, while picking out the imperfections.

A tumbler is a mesh drum with a door on one side. Tumbling the handpicked fiber helps us get rid of most residues of dirt, soil and grass, before washing the fiber.

Washing is best done with a special detergent and hot water. We use environmentally friendly palm oil based products.

Fiber is air dried after it has been thoroughly washed.

After washing, the fiber will naturally begin to clump slightly. To separate it into a consistent pile of soft and fluffy matter, we pass it through a picker which has long, very sharp needles that separate the clumps.

This is a process to remove long, coarse guard hairs from the mixture. Dehairing the fleece guarantees us the finest possible fiber. (70% baby alpaca-30% alpaca).

Fiber is put through a series of combing steps called carding. The carder combs the wool many times by transferring it back and forth from one drum to the other as it is passed down the series of drums. The result of carding the fiber is a roving which is a slightly twisted sliver of fiber.

A draft frame is the machine that further aligns and extends the rovings, and twists them just enough for them to be ready for spinning.

This process turns the roving into yarn.

After spinning the fiber, several strands of yarn are twisted together to make multi-ply yarn.

Our yarn is passed through a vaporizing process that helps set the fiber so that it doesn’t twitch.